Yes, I’m about a month late with this. The excuse is that it took me a while to come up with any goals, then I made a list of overly lofty ones which quickly fell apart, so now I’m reassessing my intentions and writing about it here seems a good reminder for myself.

First, a brief summary of 2018. A lot happened because a lot is always happening. I moved to central London and was floating ten feet off the ground for about a month. I worked my first office job and learned a lot in the process. I went to Copenhagen (an overpriced, overpolished, beautiful dream of a place), went to Paris twice, and to Cape Town for work. I did Whole30 three times. I went about 3 months without drinking 3 times and actually stopped smoking. Blogging went better than ever. I turned 21 which was a miserable affair. I finally found a skincare brand I’m not allergic to (and I’m allergic to basically all of the so-called hypoallergenic ones) which is a bigger deal than it sounds.

There was a lot of shittiness, most of which came down to predictable causes which I’m now working on. I’d say that July was the only good month; otherwise, things were constantly getting messy and falling apart, I kept getting ill as did family members, and other stuff I won’t go into. There’s a lot to improve, but things have started looking up in January. The summary of what I wrote in 2018 is here.

This is another entirely self-indulgent post, feel free to skip.

***

Books

I’m not setting a goal to read a particular number of books, because that’s kind of pointless. But I do have two book-related goals:

Read more books by women & more diverse authors. While the fact that ~90% of the books I read are by white men is more a function of bias in the publishing industry than in me, I need to make a conscious effort to consider the type of world view I’m absorbing — especially as I share book recommendations on my blog each month. (Please feel free to bombard me with suggestions.)

Take more notes from what I read to refer to later. I’m getting better at this over time. It’s especially important as I move a lot and can’t keep many books.

***

Work

I guess the goal here is to not fuck up my new job because I love it. That’s all.

I’m not setting any particular goals for my personal blogging. It would be nice to hit 10k followers on Medium by the end of the year, but that’s a meaningless metric. So my intention is to write as often as possible and to have fun with it. Wherever that leads me is fine. I’m focusing more on Medium than my personal website though.

***

People

My main focus for this year is on people. I’ve spent the last two years being ‘too busy’ and ‘too anxious’ to date or socialize much which is obviously an excuse and a bad one.

The goal is to try to spend time with people, either on a date or in some social capacity, twice a week (unless I’m ill or travelling or otherwise unable to.) That’s a pretty big stretch compared to normal. As I still don’t know many people, that means putting a lot of energy into meeting new ones.

I managed this in the first two weeks of the year. This week I have a messed up eye so I can’t do anything. But I have lots of plans for the rest of the month.

Oh, and I’ve decided to throw myself in at the deep end and move into a warehouse with ~24 other people, none of whom I know. It seems like a quick way to force myself to be more sociable, even if I don’t stay long. So the other goal is to learn how to live with people and hopefully befriend at least a couple of my future housemates.

***

Health

I was on a lot of medication at once in 2018 (antibiotics for months) so my main health goal is to repair the damage from that.

The best thing I can probably do for my health right now is to focus on not getting so stressed all the time because that’s what makes me sick.

I do need to stop living on cereal and take out. The problem is that I’m never particularly enthused about food and just want whatever takes the least time. I don’t care enough to cook nicely. But it’s not a good habit. I tried a bunch of elimination diets in 2018 and concluded that raw veganism is the only thing that stops me feeling nauseous all the time. It’s just difficult to sustain and probably not that healthy. So I need to find a midpoint.

My joints can’t handle heavy exercise right now but I plan to at least start stretching again.

***

Misc

I’m working a lot on emotional intelligence at the moment. Namely, I’m trying to be kinder to people. I have a horrible tendency to lash out when someone hurts me which I’m finally managing to disrupt. That habit needs breaking.

I need to waste less money and the warehouse move is a deliberate aid with that — it’s not near many shops so I can’t keep spending stupid amounts of money on coffees and snacks. Also, the rent is slightly more reasonable than for central London. Only slightly though.

I want to dress a bit better (aka, stop wearing clothes with huge holes/stains because I’m too lazy to buy new ones and also waste all my money ordering food.)